Monday, November 24, 2014

Or are human beings inclined to right… presuming that they
know what the right thing is?

And then, there is the question of evil people.

Are some people so evil that they must be removed from human
society? Are some people so irredeemably evil that we should never have
dealings with them? Are some people so evil that they must be destroyed?

Also, are our motives all infused with so much evil that we will
never do the right thing, except under threat of force?

All of these questions quickly become murky. If we are all
capable of doing ill, then we become evil by doing ill consistently and
habitually, without regard for the good of other people.

In psychological terms, people who are evil have no
conscience and no feeling for others … they are in it for themselves, to the
point that they get off on watching others suffer the pain they have inflicted.

But then, what if the pain is punishment, inflicted on
someone who needs to pay for his misdeeds? Are those who inflict it evil?

And then there is this question: what is the difference between
having the capacity to do ill and having a propensity to do ill?

Doing good has no sense and no value if we do not
have the capacity to do something other than the good. But, are we more
inclined to do the right thing than the wrong thing… assuming that we know the
difference? Or are we really inclined to do ill?

Philosopher John Gray has been defending a rather bleak view
of human nature, one that derives in part from Freud and that shares his abject
pessimism about our species. Gray has proposed that human beings are naturally
prone to do evil.

Recently, he explained the basic Western view of evil:

… destructive
human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this
old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and
self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of
morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile
artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance
that it never goes away.

If we all contain a propensity for evil and if all of
morality is a necessary constraint on our will to act on the propensity, as
Gray believes, he is clearly on the side of a bleak and tragic view of human
nature.

But he is also laying down predicates that would justify
forcing people to do what we tell them.

Surely, there is more to morality and ethics than the need
to tamp down, to restrain and constrain a will to do evil.

Much of ethics is about doing the right thing. One suspects
that such precepts are even more prevalent than those that tell us not to do
the wrong thing.

Besides, there is more to doing the right thing than not
doing the wrong thing.

Those believers in the human propensity to do evil have
latched on to what are called the Milgram experiments. They seemed to
demonstrate that students have an innate will to cause other people to
suffer.

You
might have heard of another famous study involving electric shocks, in which
people did not act so kindly toward each other; that study, done in the 1970s
and led by Stanley Milgram, found that people obeyed an experimenter's
instructions to send what appeared to be increasingly painful shocks to a
stranger.

Dahl brought up the Milgram experiments because a new set of
experiments, performed by another group of scientists has arrived at a
radically different conclusion.

They have shown that college students, under the right
circumstances, are willing to lose more money in order to spare strangers from
pain than they were willing to lose to spare themselves the same pain.

Dahl summarizes the study:

Participants
were paired with partners, though they never saw each other, and seated in
front of separate computers. One of each pair was named the
"decider," meaning they got to choose how many shocks to deliver to
either themselves or their partner. Sending fewer of the jolts meant less
money, while sending more of them meant a profit that ranged from $0.15 to $15
(which the decider always got to keep, no matter who got the zap). On average,
the deciders were willing to lose about $0.30 to give themselves fewer shocks.
But they gave up double that, $0.60 on average, to save their partner from the
pain. (In a write-up of the paper, Science compared the pain of
the shock to holding your wrist under a stream of 122-degree water.)

So, maybe it’s not quite as bleak as some people thought. Maybe
human beings are not irrationally inclined to hurt each other.

This suggests that, in many cases we can appeal to people’s
wish to do the right thing. Even in what has been called a narcissistic age
many of us are still sufficiently considerate to be more inclined to suffer ourselves than to cause others pain.

If we do well not to draw outsized conclusions from the
Milgram experiment, we do well not to jump to an overly optimistic conclusion
from the latest study.

If anything, these experiments signal the danger that lies
in giving too much credence and in drawing too large a conclusion from a single
experiment.

The problem does not lie in the experiments, but in the
conceptual tools the researchers are deploying. Being scientists they are not
overly familiar with the art of defining concepts. Thus, they tend to jump to
the conclusions that prove their own preconceptions.

The question remains: if evil exists, is it a human
propensity, a fundamental drive that needs to be kept in check by Herculean
restraint or is it a human capacity that can be tempered by learning how to do
the right thing… habitually?

1 comment:

re: The question remains: if evil exists, is it a human propensity, a fundamental drive that needs to be kept in check by Herculean restraint or is it a human capacity that can be tempered by learning how to do the right thing… habitually?

As always, we need definitions if there's any hope in answering. And can evil be isolated within an individual, or might there even be a "field" of evil that "infects" vulnerable individuals.

Like the bible says "The love of money is the root of all evil." so money exists on the outside an "infects" individuals who are vulnerable.

I like the idea that evil doesn't exist in action, but exists in the covering up of actions.

So you could say Lance Armstrong's sin wasn't in his cheating, but maintaining an "image" of honesty that wasn't real. Like his quote "What am I on? I'm on my bike, busting my ass six hours a day." He's not just claiming innocence, he's expressing contempt for the question, as if he was above reproach.

Scott Peck took a very serious look at evil, wrote a book called "People of the lie." and I can't remember much, but my picture is a disconnect from conscience, so under the right system where they can get what they want, their evil remains dormant, but if they gain access to power with accountability, they'll find nothing inside that will tell them no.

And I can go back to Genesis and the garden of evil, and the one tree we were not to eat from, the tree of knowledge, but not just any knowledge, but knowledge of good and evil.

This oldest image of God to me shows perhaps the mythic birth of the conscience, since God sees everything, there's no use in trying to lie, or hide, because whatever you do will be seen, and will be judged.

My dad left the Christian church in part for its focus on guilt, and punishment, and he hated the idea of original sin, the idea that children were born in sin. But it never affected me like that, maybe since I had siblings rivalry to test the limits of my claim to innocence, which I mean none at all.

So my idea is we all have a potential for evil, but that potential can only be realized if we somehow can't accept truth of our own behavior, and whatever defense mechanisms we learn as children become our enablers towards evil, unless we can recognize when we're doing it.

Jordan Perterson had a worthy talk of the Nature of Evil recently:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLp7vWB0TeY

Many or even most scientists are atheists, and would prefer to dismiss love and evil (antilove as Peck says), and put them under evolution's adaptations. Then they need humanism to explain although it doesn't really matter, there's no judgment day, but if just feels good to do good, without asking why it also feels good to do bad.

As an agnostic, I see a middle ground, don't expect a literally heaven or hell, but accept what we does matters, in more ways than merely our own salvation, but I consider when we're dishonest, that fragments our perceptions, and we end up living our lives at a lower level of awareness than otherwise.

On the other side, I wonder about guilt. If I'm negligent and drive drunk and kill someone, and leave the scene of the crime, how would I live with that? And a million smaller things. I think its better to live with an honest memory, but that also means life becomes less joyful when you find debts you can never repay.

That's where Christianity offers something seemingly unique, complete forgiveness as soon as you repent, so there's no excuse for self-destructive actions, for anything we do. But emotionally or intellectually, it seems outrageous, to let yourself off the hook without some sort of purgatory.

I'm sure there's a difference between unconditional love and forgiveness and denial of culpability, but on the outside they appear identical.